With regards to authenticity in the Tweetspace: Earlier this year on the 5^th of March there was an earth quake in the Melbourne region which shook everyone a little as it's not a common occurrence. Tweets started to steam out about the occurrence and our local vetted ABC radio/TV channel which has a Twitter account @774melbourne followed it furiously trying to get the "right" story and doing a good job of it. The size of the tremor was being reported as 5+ on many accounts and this was starting to become official. A month earlier there had been a quake a few thousand km away in the pacific and people who were Googling "earthquake Australia" were in their haste seeing the size of a quake as 5.7 . Chinese whispers took this into the Tweepspace and I heard people talking about it in town the following day giving this statistic. There had been an Earthquake on the 14^th of February near Fiji which measured 5.7 and from what I can gather the two occurrences were being linked. The actual size of the quake in Melbourne was 4.6

Following on from this another story: On the 18^th of march @Wolfcat from the The ABC (Australia) was asked to present how Twitter had been used during the devastating Australian Victoria bushfires to locate lost loved ones and deliver critical information to those under threat. @Wolfcat had established and oversaw the Twitter channel for this part of the ABC. He was not given long to present and asked the audience to please understand that he could not give it its due in the short time he had allocated to him. Instead he would present on the Earthquake which occurred on the 5^th of March and how the ABC had operated in order to feed the relevant information out to the Tweetspace. It was really interesting as he explained how he had developed a method of establishing the Epicentre of this seismic event based on his mapping of the regions the relevant Tweets were coming in from.

As is happening more and more during seminar sessions there was a Twitter Tag #v21 which the audience were including in their Tweet threads out to their followers to keep on topic. I was sitting in the audience and started to feel the room shake while @Wolfcat was explaining all this. I immediately blamed it on a strong black coffee I had had during the break and having missed lunch earlier. Low and behold the streams of Tweets from outside the room started to come back in on the #v21 that there had just been another Earthquake. More and more tweets came streaming in and the session room started to buzz with this massive coincidence. http://tinyurl.com/n7nsx5  .

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[video:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Je5gnqkE_AE 400x400]

Physical conference events are becoming more and more sophisticated and I remember realizing this when I attended one situated in the gardens of the Palace of Versailles which was impressive for a start. I had intended during the first coffee break of the day to meet with the information manager of Pfizer Europe. As I exited into the break rooms of which there were many I was greeted by a representative in a black suite who was part of the conference coordination team. He asked me who I would like to meet. He had a headset on and as I let him know, he was immediately relayed information as to which table the Information Manager of Pfizer  was taking a biscuit off at that precise moment and took me across and introduced me to him. This to me was the height of coordination and service.

Now let's step into the virtual world for a little while should we. I was privileged enough to attend a evening seminar (Knowledge Management Leadership Forum in Melbourne) this week where the speaker (Helen Mitchell from CPA Australia) had Project Managed the development of and coordinated a conference session on Second Life. Now for those of you who are new to the virtual world, Second Life is a whole "other world, " which exists in Cyberspace. It's a world portrayed much like our own where you are represented as an Avatar which can walk and talk(though your headset) and interacts with other avatars, who are real people sitting at computers, pulling the strings with their keyboards. A seminar in Second Life has chairs and stage along with all the wonderful other things we take for granted when we attend such an event, all taken care of by the Event Coordinator and a vast behind the scenes team. These things we take for granted are plants, seating setup the colour of the carpet and the room, backdrop and much much more. In Second Life this all has to be built from scratch after you hire the land to build it on or you could hire the venue at a lesser cost. There is a massive amount of detail to consider if you were to build it yourself so once again there are software development companies who do it for you on specification.

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 Having spent the last six years running a few business's in a regional part of Australia I felt compelled to tell you this little story.

How do Australians, Americans, Brits and the rest of the world perceive AUSTRALIA? Think about this for a minute and form an opinion before reading on.

OK now that you have done that little exercise is your Australia more than the sum of the parts of Sydney and Melbourne. I hope so. It's massive, it's dispersed and it's diverse in nature and culture.

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This is the way of the future in our lives as we know it. Back in the mid to late 90's we did see a spate of broadcasts to launch new software products. Not sure if many of you got to see Bill Gates Launch NT but it was a similcast and we all stood in awe. Well we can do that on our desktop now and with the advent of VOIP and Open Source technologies like DimDim we can do it for free.

http://www.dimdim.com/aboutus/dimdim_blog.html

We obviously need to get used to the Social implications which are brought about by such mediums and we will trip up along the way. No one needs to be ashamed not to have used a particular technology. I often do broadcasts to board rooms where the organisers have never done this before. I have a standard e-mail template which I now send out which sets out step by step what needs to be in the room. Often its still better to dial into countries where the broadband is not that broad so to speak and only use the Internet for the presentation but that will all change in the future.

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Its often the case that one wonders when and where to use a Webcam for effective business communication. We often run training session on our solutions and typically we have not used Webcams to date. This is primarily because there has not been a webcam on the other side of the line and our presenters feel ill at ease with being watched without being able to watch the others. We wanted to pose the question as to what has worked for you and in what circumstance or environment?

Last week I was in a Webex meeting where we were presenting a product to a prospective client. We had a potential partner listening in on the demonstration and the prospect had not signed into the meeting yet. As host I had explained who the silent partner was to all participants. The prospect was the last to enter the Webex meeting. As their name appeared in the conference one of the people on the call asked the silent partner a question. At that point there was no danger of the silent partner saying something they shouldn't because the little phone had not appeared next to the prospect. The silent partner continued to talk and during them rambling on about how excited they were at the prospect of working with the new prospective client (which we didn't want the prospective client to hear) the little phone appeared next to the prospect. Who is to blame here? Should I have muted the silent partner to start with? Should the participant who asked the question of the silent partner after the little man next to the prospects name appeared, have realised that the prospect was in the imaginary room? You tell me :